My Mother’s Lovers by Christopher Hope
My Mother’s Lovers is the story of Alex who reminisces about his glamorous multi-faceted mother and the adventurous life she lived in Africa. Kathleen, a tall white woman, a woman of many talents, is a hunter, a woman with many lovers, one of them being the legendary novelist Ernest Hemingway and is an aviator who flew over South Africa.
The novel has an epigraph from Hemingway’s novel True at First Light: “In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon.” But Hem, as Kathleen calls him fondly, is there only to amplify her character and her story.
Kathleen is a superwoman of sorts, embodying the manly attributes of the colonial empire – she shoots tigers, adopts African children, mates with African men. By contrast her son is a weakling who never knew his father and grows up to sell air-conditioners, “to cool things down.” The boy flies away from his mother, from South Africa but realizes that he cannot flee. Even though his mother died, her presence stays in the form of his love Cindy, a rich successful mixed race woman.
More than anything else, Alex is fascinated with the European experience of Africa and the endless mythmaking circling around exotic primitivism of the continent. At his mother’s funeral, he realizes that his mother’s flights were attempts of escape and that she “never recognized this Africa. She has simply sailed over the top of it…” My Mother’s Lover is a tragic ode to the corrosive process of colonialism and romanticising of Africa with each adventurer scripting his or her own continent. “Not Africa the place … but Africa the production, Africa the movie, Africa the road-show.”
The novel, that blends elements of thriller, autobiography, history and satire, dissects and celebrates the fatal banality of daily life in South Africa. Hope’s ‘outrageously inventive’ and ambitious novel is peopled with unforgettable characters who face harsh tribulations making it is an epic tragicomedy, as dark as the European romancing of Africa.
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